What does a data scientist do? Not just math

Last week I was chatting with the head of a tech company about their employer branding strategy.

He explained that, right now, the hardest role to fill is data scientists and analytics professionals. India has lots of people who are great at math and coding, but the skill shortage is problem solving.

It reminded me of a presentation slide I saw somewhere, on the role of data science:

Business Problem -> Data Problem -> Data Answer -> Business Answer

If told what to code or calculate, the job applicants can do it perfectly. But when given a business problem, they don’t know how to tear it apart into data problems.

Management consultants can problem solve, but they usually can’t gather/extract/analyse the data to provide the actual answers. And they definitely can’t code machine learning models

Thats what makes true data scientists so valuable and rare. They can problem diagnose and problem solve with data.